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What Does It Really Mean To Work?
Because after twenty-five years, I’m starting to wonder
“You know what work is- if you’re
old enough to read this you know what
work is” — Philip Levine
You know what work is
We all think we do. We’ve all done things we’d rather not, led by the promise of a paycheck. A way to keep the lights on, to fuel the mitochondria, to keep the cells splitting and dividing in the low-level cancerous growth we call life.
Maybe you even enjoy it.
I’ve always thought that people who said they like their jobs were rabid fantasists, lying to themselves to make it easier to lie to others. That, or just suffering from a critical failure of the imagination.
But now I’m not so sure.
Some people — mostly men — go to pieces after they retire. They don’t know what to do with themselves.
The arena empties out, and it’s just them in the hollow heart of the amphitheatre, with the blood stains and the food wrappers and the ghosts of thousands of dead.
Work, for these men, kept them from themselves. It kept them from ever looking too closely at what, glacially and secretly, they have allowed themselves to become.
